Good Guts: Our 10 Best Offal Dishes

Nose-to-tail eating has become fashionable in the last 12 years or so, but offal never really needed the help. Anywhere you find good food you also likely find that eat-it-all ethos, whether it's as simple as sausage and paté or as elaborate as haggis and Bangladeshi stewed trotters. In New York, you could eat different offal dish every day for a year and still be spoiled for choice. Even d.o.b. 111 -- a middle-of-the-road kind of place -- serves the most wonderfully creamy lamb brain ravioli.

Whatever you call offal -- variety meat, guts, organs -- the term has come to mean the parts of the animal that are not skin, muscle, or bone. (Although some muscles are also offal, like heart and tongue.) That includes bits like tendons, intestines, stomach, marrow, blood, feet, and head.

As always, a list of 10 necessarily leaves out some excellent dishes, so let us know if we've missed your favorite.

Ready for liver, thymus gland, and tongue? Right this way.

Clockwise from top left: tongue tip, tongue sinew, and regular old tongue. The marinade is a mixture of salt, garlic, and sesame oil.